Many software licensing facilities control the use and installation of software based on the number of devices or nodes that are enabled to use it. Also, many companies use software on a variety of distributed systems that can range from a single computer for a small business to a collection of servers and a plurality of user computer nodes for a large corporation. Also, the volume of data processed by a node in a small business can be a magnitude less than the volume of data processed by a node in a large corporation.
Additionally, the type of data processed by large and small business can vary widely, such as sending and receiving messages, creating and storing documents, hosting web sites, database searches, facilitating online transactions, and the like. Furthermore, the expense of developing and maintaining software that can handle the type and volume of data processed by a large corporation can be substantially greater than the effort expended to do somewhat the same for a small business. Consequently, determining a price for the licensing of software for different sizes of businesses with different volumes of data and types of data can be difficult. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.